When bad information drives
out the good
By DAN K. THOMASSON
Scripps Howard News Service

October 04, 2005
Tuesday

WASHINGTON - Prominent Washington attorney Jay Ricks tells of
receiving an e-mail forwarded by a Jackson, Miss., doctor who
allegedly went to Houston to help with the evacuees from Hurricane
Katrina. The letter was widely circulated and was being cited
as evidence of the ingratitude of those the doctor was trying
to help.

The letter said that after
several days of putting up with the most horrendous displays
of selfishness and bad manners, including evacuees' rejecting
the food being handed out to them and demands for such things
as fast-food hamburgers and other fare, the doctor had thrown
up his hands and returned home thoroughly disgusted. It was a
none-too-subtle racial indictment clearly aimed at the evacuees,
an overwhelming number of whom are black.

Ricks noticed that there was
a telephone number attached at the end of the letter with no
explanation. He called it and was greeted by a recording from
a man who identified himself as the doctor. He completely disavowed
the entire incident and denied writing the e-mail, which he condemned.
He said he had not been to Houston in 10 years.

Therein lies the tragedy of
the Internet, where outlandish and undocumented propaganda can
gain wide currency; where "bloggers" with no journalistic
training or editorial restraint can spew without challenge the
most horrendous and inaccurate allegations to promote their aims.
The proliferation of unverifiable claptrap has become increasingly
disruptive, as more and more people eschew the traditional sources
of news and turn to the Web for their daily doses of information
or, more accurately, misinformation. Rumors that took days to
reach many now take only minutes to spread to millions.

But it would be wrong to indict
the Internet entirely. The nation's newspapers and television
networks have not shown themselves to be the most accurate. The
plight of hundreds of thousands along the Gulf Coast is a case
in point. For days following Katrina, and to some extent her
later twin, Rita, the commercial media overflowed with tales
of lawlessness, including looting, rapes and murder, particularly
in the streets and shelters of New Orleans. Armed hoodlums were
said to be roaming the corridors of the Superdome and convention
center. Speculation of the number of deaths ranged as high as
10,000 of the city's poorest, mainly drowned in the flooded Ninth
Ward and nearby parishes.

All of this was fed to the
rest of the nation - and to the world - in living color and in
the screaming headlines of daily newspapers as well as the Internet.
Television reporters were thrusting microphones in the face of
anyone who would talk and, without questioning the reliability,
allowed him or her to spread rumor after rumor. The inaccuracies
fed fear and panic instantaneously. Among the worst sources of
misinformation were the officials of the city, including Mayor
Ray Nagin and the police superintendent, Edwin Compass, who has
since resigned over his department's failures in this disaster.

Nagin, who first said that
10,000 may have died - the count is now about 885 - poured gas
on the panic by contending that Superdome evacuees were watching
"hooligans killing people, raping people." Compass
declared that tourists were being preyed on routinely and cited
horrors inside the big dome. Of course, this was not entirely
true. So far, only a handful of incidents have been classified
as violent. The rest have descended into urban legend.

It is too easy, however, to
blame the beleaguered city officials entirely - to say they had
a responsibility to be calm and accurate in their pronouncements.
That isn't always possible. But it is just routinely good journalism
to question outlandish estimates and over-the-top claims driven
by rumor and panic no matter who is issuing them. Every person
who told of a horror inside the Superdome or convention center
should have been asked whether he or she personally had witnessed
such activity. The answer would, in most cases, have tempered
the claims and put them in the proper perspective.

The combination of all this
bad information should leave Americans more than a little uneasy
about whether they truly are the best informed in the world.